The invention relates to a method for recovering group data between mobile systems, which incorporate at least one first mobile system, which comprises a first database, at least one second mobile system, which comprises a second database and a service area, and which mobile systems incorporate mobile stations as subscribers, the method comprising the steps of maintaining group data in said first database of said first mobile system, and maintaining group data in said second database of said second mobile system.
The invention relates to a plurality of mobile systems, in particular mobile systems which comprise control centres, one or more databases, base stations and radio telephones, the mobile systems having a cellular structure and each cell having at least one base station which communicates by means of one or more radio connections with at least one mobile station. The radio connection may be established by channels, of which one or more are typically used for signalling and the rest for traffic.
The method of the invention is intended for use particularly in so called trunking mobile systems, which are typically company networks or private mobile radio networks used by authorities, all the channels in these networks being allocated to one or more companies or authority organizations. In these networks, the subscribers have, apart from their own subscriber numbers, group numbers, which indicate to which group call group said subscriber belongs, whereby the calls, particularly the group calls, that are intended for all subscribers of said group, can be switched to said group subscribers.
The invention is applicable to mobile systems with either digital or analogue radio paths. Analogue mobile systems are described, for instance, in the British Department of Trade and Industry publications MPT 1327, A Signalling Standard for Trunked Private Land Mobile Radio Systems, January 1988, revised and reprinted November 1991, issued by the Radiocommunications Agency, and MPT 1343, Performance Specification, January 1988, revised and reprinted September 1991, issued by the Radiocommunications Agency.
A group call is one of the key functions in a private mobile radio network. A group call is used, among other things, in various operations involving several participants, particularly when an entire group must know all the time how things proceed. A group call is a call in which all participants may take turns to speak and to listen to each other. In group calls the whole group is called by one call number. A single radio unit, for instance, a mobile station or a radio telephone, i.e. a subscriber station, may belong to a plurality of groups which are programmed in the mobile station. Programming can be carried out permanently, but it can also be changed by the user or even by the system. Each mobile system may maintain a file on base stations relating to each group number. A group call may cover one, several or all base stations in the service area of a mobile services switching centre and a plurality of mobile services switching centres, or a group call can be established within the service area of several mobile systems.
When establishing a group call a traffic channel is allocated in all base stations relating to the group, and each of these base stations transmits. a group call request which comprises the group number and information on the allocated traffic channel. If the mobile station identifies the group number included in the group call request, it transfers to the traffic channel indicated by the group call request. Thus the mobile station that is registered in the operating area predetermined to the group, is in principle always available for a group call.
In connection with cellular radio networks it is known that group data of the radio telephones registered in said mobile system are stored in the database of the trunking mobile system, for instance in the switching centre or in its visitor location register or home location register.
The group data (group profile) contain data that inform the subscribers of said group, or some subscribers of the group, of available or activated services, for instance, of supplementary services. The group profile may also contain definition of importance, i.e. priority, of said group or its subset. Moreover, the group profile may contain information which subscribers belong to said group, i.e. a list which includes the identifiers of such subscribers that are allowed to participate in communication within said group, e.g. in a group call, in the service area of said mobile system, in its specific location areas (Location Area) or its specific base stations.
This group profile is stored, for instance, in a volatile RAM memory, wherefrom the data disappears, for instance, when the power supply for the database is switched off, and at regular intervals in a non-volatile memory means, for instance, on a hard disk on which the data are maintained permanently. When the RAM database at times restarts itself, the group profile stored in the volatile memory disappears. Only the group data stored in the non-volatile memory, for instance, on the hard disk; remain.
The disappearance of group data from the databases causes a serious problem in the group of a plurality of mobile systems, since if a given group call extends to the service areas of several mobile systems, group data of the group call are stored in the databases of all said several mobile systems. Hence, if the database of any one of the mobile systems has to be driven down and since the down-driven database cannot continuously update the changes that have taken place in the group""s group profile, these data may change in the meantime in the databases of other mobile systems, but remain unchanged in said down-driven database. As a consequence, the group data contained in the databases of different mobile systems become different, on one hand in the down-driven database and on the other hand in other normally functioning databases.
This difference between the group data of the databases may bring about a situation that a given mobile station is allowed to join a group call in a first mobile system, but in a second mobile systems aid mobile station is not allowed to join the same group call, since the data of said group have not been maintained updated in said mobile system, nor in its database.
In accordance with the prior art, it is possible to try to maintain the database contents of various mobile systems consistent by using so called recovery.
The recovery method utilizes a normal inter-network sequence of mobile systems, or the like, by which sequence attachment and detachment requests sent by subscriber terminals operating in the network are processed, the requests being addressed to a group of another network. In the TETRA mobile system this sequence is an ANF-ISIMM sequence; That sequence is described in the TETRA specification ETS 300 392-3-5, Part 3: Inter-working basic operations; Part 3-5. Additional Network Feature Inter-System Interface for Mobility Management (ANF-ISIMM), ETSI, March 1997, 167 pages.
A normal update sequence of group profile starts, when a subscriber terminal sends an attachment request to a mobile system and said mobile system is not the group""s home-mobile system. In the TETRA mobile system, the home mobile system is home SwMI, and correspondingly, the visited mobile system is visited SwMI. The visited mobile system thus communicates the attachment request to the group""s home mobile system which stores in its database information on the attachment and replies to the visited mobile system by sending it the group profile. The visited mobile system stores the attachment and other group data in its database. The group data are kept stored in the database of the visited mobile system as long as there is at least one valid attachment request for said group.
When the visited mobile system receives an attachment request from the subscriber terminal, any of the following procedures can be applied:
1) If several subscriber terminals send attachment requests for the same group of a second mobile system in the same visited mobile system, the visited mobile system sends the attachment request only once to the home mobile system upon receipt of the first attachment request. The home mobile system of the group call is the system in the database of which the group profile of said group is stored, for instance.
2) The above-described procedure can be supplemented with a so called xe2x80x98important userxe2x80x99 definition: important users can be defined in the group, and the attachment request sent by them is always communicated to the home mobile system of the group. Thus, the important users are prioritized users.
3) Alternatively, the visited mobile system always sends the attachment request to the home mobile system upon receipt of an attachment request from a subscriber terminal.
In accordance with a corresponding principle as the one described above, the visited mobile system communicates one or more detachments requests received from radio subscribers to the homed mobile system. The detachment requests are communicated one per group or important user or subscriber. Hence the attachment data are deleted from the database of the home mobile system and the attachment and other group data are deleted from the databases of the visited mobile systems correspondingly.
If the visited mobile system sends the attachment request to the home mobile system only once when receiving the first attachment request, the detachment request is sent to the home mobile system only after it is received from the last subscriber attached to said group in the visited mobile system. All data of said group are thus deleted from the database of the visited mobile system. In addition, as for this subscriber, the attachment data of said subscriber is deleted from the database of the group""s and the subscriber""s home mobile system.
A detachment request received from an important user always deletes the attachment data concerning said subscriber from both databases. In addition, the previous rule is applied to a detachment request received from an important user, if said user/subscriber was the last subscriber of the group.
If the visited mobile system always sends an attachment request to the home mobile system upon receipt of an attachment request from a subscriber terminal, the detachment request is also always sent to the home mobile system. If the detachment request arrives from the last subscriber attached to said group in the visited mobile system, all data of said group are deleted from the database of the visited mobile system. In addition, as for this subscriber, the attachment data of said subscriber is deleted from the database of the group""s and the subscriber""s home mobile system.
FIG. 1 illustrates a radio subscriber xe2x80x98visited SwMI/MMxe2x80x99 101, a visited mobile system xe2x80x98visited SwMM/FE3xe2x80x99 102 and a home mobile system. xe2x80x98Home SwMI/FE2xe2x80x99 103. The figure shows the parameters transmitted in each message or signal. GTSI, i.e. Group Tetra Subscriber Identity, is a group identifier, ITSI is a radio subscriber identifier. The ITSI identifier need not be transmitted if the first attachment request and the last detachment request of the group are only communicated to the home mobile system, in other words, if important subscribers are not favoured or prioritized and all attachment requests are not communicated.
In FIG. 1, the mobile station 101 sends an attachment request 105 by which the mobile station wishes to be attached to a group within the service area of the visited mobile system concerned; In response to the above-mentioned request, the visited mobile system checks the database whether the visited mobile system is ready to support the use of said group. In the affirmative, the visited mobile system forwards 106 the attachment request to the home mobile system FE2103 of the group. The home mobile system checks its database whether it is ready to support the use of said group in the visited mobile system for said subscriber. In the affirmative, the home mobile system transmits 107 the data of said group to the visited mobile system which sends 108 an acknowledgement. After receiving it, the home mobile system sends 109 an acknowledgement to the visited mobile system 102 that the whole sequence has succeeded. The visited mobile system further acknowledges 110 the mobile station 101. The above-described sequence is an example of a prior art procedure, in which the first subscriber/mobile station wishes to be attached to a group in the service area of said mobile system in a situation where the attachment is viable.
The object of the invention is to provide a method and an equipment implementing the method to the effect that the above problems can be solved.
This is achieved with a method characterized in that the method further comprises the following steps:
a recovery request for recovering group data is made; the second mobile system generates one or more first virtual attachment requests for the first database of said group; the second mobile system sends the first virtual attachment request to the first database of the first mobile system; in response to the first virtual attachment request, said group data are updated in the first database.
The invention also relates to an arrangement for recovering group data between mobile systems, in which there are at least one first mobile system which comprises a first database where group data are maintained, at least one second mobile system which comprises a second database where said group data are maintained, and in which there are mobile stations.
The arrangement in accordance with the invention for recovering the group data between mobile systems is characterized in that the first mobile system comprises first generating means for generating a virtual attachment request for the second database and for transmitting the virtual attachment request to the second database of the second mobile system, whereby the second database is arranged to update the group data in the second database in response to said virtual attachment request, and that the second mobile system comprises second generating means for generating a virtual attachment request for the first database and for transmitting the virtual attachment request to the first database of the first mobile system, whereby the first database is arranged to update the group data in the first database in response to the virtual attachment request.
The invention is based on the idea that the recovery of subscriber group data can be carried out in such a way that a virtual attachment request, generated by the system, is sent for each visiting subscriber from a visited mobile system or a visited node to the home mobile system or the home node, whereby the group data and possibly the location and subscriber data concerning the subscriber are updated in all databases in accordance with the normal attachment sequence.
The idea of the invention is to recover the data of group call groups between interconnected mobile systems by sending to the home mobile system of each group an attachment request, similar to a normal attachment request, generated by the visited mobile system, for each group of another mobile system in use in the visited mobile system, whereby the group data are updated in the mobile systems in accordance with the normal attachment sequence. The invention also relates to an idea, according to which the home mobile system keeps a record, during the recovery, of what attachment data are processed in recovery. When the home mobile system receives a notification from the visited mobile system that the part of the visited mobile system is over, the home mobile system goes through its database and compares whether there are attachment data concerning the visited mobile system that have remained unprocessed, because the visited mobile system did not notify thereof. The home mobile system transmits said attachment data to the visited mobile system by a virtual attachment request according to the normal attachment sequence. The virtual attachment requests include the age of said attachment data. The visited mobile system accepts the attachment request received from the home mobile system if the visited mobile system has not stored later, corresponding detachment data. The visited mobile system may reject the attachment request also for some other reason, for instance, if the visited mobile system does not support the group in question.
Further alternatively, the home mobile system does not keep a record of the attachment data transmitted by the visited mobile system,but retrieves from its database all the attachment data relating to the visited mobile system and transmits them to said visited mobile system. An advantage of this procedure is simplicity, since record keeping is not needed. However, in this case the resource consumption is not optimal.
The invention relates to a method and an arrangement for recovering group call group data, i.e. a group profile, of visiting subscribers between mobile systems and/or databases of mobile networks.
The invention is used for detecting and correcting inconsistencies in group profiles in interconnected TETRA mobile networks.
An advantage of this kind of a method in accordance with the invention is that it solves the problems of the prior art solutions.
The method and arrangement in accordance with the invention also have the advantage that the method utilizes normal group data processing sequences. This simplifies the implementation of recovery and improves reliability.
The invention also alleviates loading problems of mobile systems, since by means of the invention the loading caused by recovery is automatically adjusted according to load conditions of each mobile system or connections between mobile systems, if the recovery is carried out in accordance with the most preferable embodiment, i.e. transmission synchronization employing acknowledgments.
Further, the invention has an advantage that no data need be deleted from the databases, unless there are more correct data vis-a-vis the data previously stored in the database.
The invention also has an advantage that the method of the invention allows starting in a variety of ways, for instance, periodically, at the user""s command or as a result of a detected or assumed fault.
A further advantage of the invention is that it is suitable for background processing in the mobile system.
The invention further has an advantage that it is not bound to impulses coming from subscriber terminals. Therefore, it is possible to recover with the method of the invention also in cases where no impulse is received from the subscriber.
One advantage of the invention is also that therewith it is possible to make the recovery rate and loading adjustable in accordance with other loading in mobile systems.
The invention has an advantage that the rate of recovery implemented therewith does not depend on a random time of arrival of the impulses.
The invention has an advantage that it does not consume radio resources at all.
The invention has an advantage that by synchronizing the transmission of a new attachment request with the acknowledgment of the preceding one, the recovery load can be adjusted in accordance with the total load, when there is available capacity.
The invention has an advantage that an additional load caused by it is minimal, when some part of the system is loaded for some other reason.
The invention has an advantage that when operating in accordance therewith, a node of the mobile system does load another node or connection in a way that is unmanageable to them.